Category: Comic Books

I read a lot of books last year. 139 averages out to about 1 book every 2.6 days. My intention was to make comments about my favorite books and where I was when I read certain books, etc. But this has been a draft for a few weeks now – so I’m just going to post it without embellishment. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have (like – how the heck did I read 139 books when I worked 3 jobs last year?).

It’s not news that I am a huge sci-fi-fantasy-comic-book-alternate-universe story freak. I was watching The Matrix (for possibly the 30th time) the other day when I had a narrative epiphany. Or maybe an epiphany about narratives. Speculative fiction video narratives, to be exact.

Stories have to end sooner or later, in some kind of satisfactory manner – or else the things that excited it us (What do the machines want? Are those people dead? What is the Matrix? What is the Island?) will just start piling up and pissing us off. So. How do you end it? How do you tell interesting stories – in worlds that must be explained – without either burying the viewers with WAY too much technical information, or else short-changing them?

Different story tellers make different choices. Those who are truly successful balance the world building, character exposition and plot perfectly – so we get most of our questions answered, and give a shit about the characters they happened to. I believe this is more difficult in a story in which one must convince the viewer that the world itself exists, in addition to believable characters and a plot that is both interesting and surprising (but not too).

The Matrix Trilogy vs. Lost

Both were very successful out of the gate. Both were very ambitious. Both asked all kinds of interesting questions and answered a few of them in the beginning. Both had a huge following.

And both of them had a huge portion of their followers HATE the way they ended.

In the Matrix story (I’m sticking to just the three films, here. I know there’s a lot more info in Animatrix and the games and whatnot, but the major thread is contained in the films), the writers/directors chose to explain everything they could: the Oracle, the Core, the Architect, Zion, the machines… on and on and on. An entire cosmology and ideology and history and everything. They knew this world inside and out and they shared it with us. And a lot of people (not me) thought it was boring and lame and too complicated. Like you had to take notes just to understand what was going on. And the characters are not terribly complicated. Good guys and girls, bad guys and girls. Boy loves girl, gets girl. Sketched in histories, lots of emotion but not too much depth. In the choice between plot and character, the Wachowski Brothers chose plot. It works well in the first flick, and by the third flick it’s clear that plot is what must sustain us. For many, it was not enough. Or maybe too much – plot, that is, and not enough character. Time restrictions play a factor here – how long can the film be? (IMHO, their worst mistake – horrible recast of the Oracle. I know the original actress died, but they did a crappy job of choosing her replacement. Ack!)

In Lost, the TV series, Abrams and Lindelhof et.al., chose character over plot. We get histories, alternate futures, heavy interactions and lots of ambiguity. Sawyer: good guy or bad guy? Kate: bad girl or good girl? Who are the Others? And the other Others? They built a compelling but barely explicated cosmology that sacrificed detail for emotional impact. And some people HATED it. How did the smoke monster work, exactly? Were they dead the whole time? Why wasn’t Mr. Eko in the church at the end? For those who cared more about character, the ending was great (at that point, all I cared about was Sawyer and Juliet being reunited). I don’t need to know why pulling that strange stone plug out of a pool underground made the smoke monster mortal. It did, that’s what mattered. For those who wanted to KNOW, they had more questions at the end than ever.

So:
End of Matrix – finally! Who cares if it was the machines or the Architect or whatever. The humans lived. Good. Moving on.

End of Lost – What?! So were they dead? Were they dreaming? So was the island real? Did they die in the first plane crash? What about the smoke monster? Have you ever hated anyone as much as Benjamin Linus?

If you don’t get the balance just right, you will leave half your fan base angry and unsatisfied.

Many successful science fiction movies are set in the future – far enough away that you should expect for things not to make sense to your poor, feeble 21-century brain. With something like the Matrix, you have to explain why the world looks like ours but isn’t, and how it’s going to end, but it’s already ended 5 times before, but this time it’s different. Lost had six years and two timelines of strange happenings, and chooses not to give many details on most of them. But we know A LOT about Jack, and Kate, and Sawyer and Hurley and Mr. Eko and Sayid and Juliet and Ben and Locke and everyone else.

Comic books (and regular book series as well) have the luxury of drawing out the universe, painting it and describing it and making it real and believable and understandable, for years and years and pages and pages, without the obligation to tie all the loose ends or finish every sub plot at the end of each book/year/story arc/what-have-you. It can create a place, pose 10 questions, answer 3 of them, and then continue on, asking more questions and answering a few here and there. This freedom from deadline (at least in theory) is part of the reason it is hard to quit reading them. One story may end, but the universe is still there, having other stories being told all over it.

Okay, so I don’t know exactly what it all means. But it seemed interesting. To me, at least. I wouldn’t presume to speak for all of you.

Bonus epiphany: theme of both Lost & Matrix = Love conquers all. Okay, so it’s a common theme. So what? It just occurred to me, so that makes it a super-amazing realization. And probably the reason I liked both of them. Well, that and cute boys.

I’ve once again broken the list of books I read into two posts – scientifically separated into ‘those I’ve typed up’ and ‘those I haven’t finished typing yet.’ Only 13 books read in June, and that’s including two audio books and two I did not finish. In my defense, I was on vacation for almost half that time, so I actually had a social life (but also time to read on airplanes. hmm)

Avram Davidson Treasury. I only read a few of the stories in this collection of horror stories (unsurprisingly recommended by Mr. Gaiman). Not bad, but not really my thing.

The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford. Most definitely my thing. Spufford examines the books he read as a child – after confessing that he is a devourer of fiction and an addict. Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, most of the books he discusses are books I also loved as a child – and he looks at how they shaped and fed him as a human being and helped make him the person he is now – while never being boring once. Loved it. Need to own this one and read it all the way through in one shot, instead of reading the first half in one week and then the second half two weeks later after returning from vacation.

The Scar by China Miéville. The night before I left on a multi-city, 12-day vacation, I was horrified to discover that I had no books to take with me. And by ‘no books’, I mean only one or two that looked interesting. Unbelievable. I was so worried about making sure I didn’t get fines for overdue books while I was gone that I forgot to stock up!

And then I remembered another of the great things about living in Portland – the bookstore at the airport is POWELL’S! And knowing that, I was able to sleep peacefully. Going to the airport early, as recommended by TSA, is no hardship when you can spend that (unnecessary, in this case) time browsing a good bookstore – with practically a mandate to buy something, since you have exactly two books to cover three days of flying in your 12 day trip. The Scar is one of the two books I bought that morning (Dune being the other – no, I’ve never read it. Yes, I know they can yank my sci-fi card for that) and the one I decided would be good Portland-to-Chicago reading material. And it was. Science-Fi-Fantasy-Otherworld fiction at its finest. It was strange to find that – while I didn’t really like or dislike the main character, Bellis, I could not stop reading it. A convoluted, elaborate world – that apparently resides in a few other novels by Miéville – full of well-drawn human-people and nonhuman-people – and some very NON-human-nonhumans as well. This book rekindled a desire to read more sci-fi that I have yet to really indulge. But every time I see The Scar on the bookshelf, I want to go to the store.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Saffron Foer. This is the first novel by the fabulous JSF (who I heap praise on here, and who can be heard here) which I bought at the bookstore* closest to my big Sista’s house in New Hampshire – not realizing that I’d read it before (but thankfully did not actually own. Of course, if I’d owned it, I’d likely have remembered that I read it). Not as utterly fantastic as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but still crazy-good by any other standard.

This novel is the story of a girl in an old picture as imagined by JSFoer, and the story of someone, coincidentally, named JSFoer, who travels to Ukraine to do research on said girl, as told by the very-much-not-a-professional tour guide he employs while there. Amazing in its ability to fashion a beautiful story in such a strange way.

*Four books are still not enough, duh. And the Big Sista asked what we wanted to see/do, and I wanted to see and most definitely do the bookstore. It was a pretty good bookstore considering the very small population in the area. It had a big touristy focus that didn’t take away from the other sections, and even a small used-books section that I totally missed on our first trip there. (Second trip was because Little Sista had to return her broken booklight. For reals. Not my idea.)

Preludes and Nocturnesby Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones, III. In the category of ‘the strangest way in which Gaiman has materialized in my life without my seeking him’, I present the appearance of the graphic novel, Preludes and Nocturnes.

After a significantly-less-than-pleasant and not-even-close-to-timely trip from Chicago to New Hampshire, I arrived with both Sistas and one niece at Big Sista’s house at something like 4:30am (scheduled arrival: 11pmish). We were variously tired and lagged and hungry and trying to ready ourselves mentally for sleeping. I wandered into the kitchen because hungry was something I could probably remove from the list rather easily – and what do I find sitting on a side table in the hall? Preludes and Nocturnes – the first eight books of Gaiman’s Sandman series. Belonged to Big Brutha-in-Law, bought for him by a co-worker not long before that day. Trust me, at 5am it was a freaky coincidence. As a bonus, it was a book I had not read (having confused it with Endless Nights, which I had read). People wonder why I’m a little strange on the subject of Neil Gaiman.

This book is the set-up of the character and world of the Sandman (also known as Dream, Morpheus and many other names in time and space). I think I went online and reserved Absolute Sandman 1 after reading it, but it may have been before that. This books is also the reason I was cranky (here) when I finally got AS 1, because I’d read the eight of the 20 stories already and had to wait forever again for AS 2.

Avram Davidson Treasury– I only read a few of the stories in this collection of horror stories (unsurprisingly recommended by Mr. Gaiman). Not bad, but not really my thing.

The Child that Books Built – Francis Spufford. Most definitely my thing. Spufford goes through the books he read as achild – after confessing that he is a devourer of fiction and an addict. Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, most of the books he discusses are books I also loved as a child – and he looks at how the shaped and fed his as a human being and help make him the person he is now. Loved it. Need to wont this one and read it all th way through in one shot, instead of reading the first half in one week and then the second have 2 weeks later after returning from vacation.

Five of the books I read in May were by Neil Gaiman. Three of them were comic book collections, so those are a quicker read, usually. But still – that’s a lot of Gaiman. And that doesn’t include the months (and months) of blog posts I read. Plus, he’s the reason I read Alabaster. So, yeah.

He shows up a lot in June as well. And July. He’s a talented, prolific guy, what can I say?

***

Absolute Death & Endless Nights and Marvel 1602, all by Neil Gaiman and various artists (Dave McKean, Mark Buckingham, P. Craig Russell & Andy Kubert to name a few). Reading these reminded me of how much I loved reading comics. Not as a kid, as an adult. I got hooked on X-Men comics the summer after I graduated from high school (my roommate had been collecting for years and I got to read all he had, and then had to start collecting my own when I moved away). I finally stopped collecting them after 10 years – not because I stopped liking them, but because it was too expensive to keep up with all the storylines I was interested in, too much work to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and they are much more fragile than books. Plus, I was a broke child and had to economize. But I never stopped liking them. I got all of these at the library – yay, libraries with graphic novels!

Absolute Death* & Endless Nights are both oversized collections from the Sandman comic book series. Death is the incarnation of death (a happy young goth girl) who is one of the Endless, a group of immortals (but not exactly) which includes Dream, Destruction, Desire, Delirium (formerly Delight), Destiny and Despair. Absolute Death is a collection of the Sandman stories that Death starred in, and Endless Nights has one story about each of the Endless. Both include forwards, extra text/sketches/back story/etc not included in the original comics. Much awesomeness.

Marvel 1602is that most perfect of things: A COMIC BOOK by NEIL GAIMAN that has the X-MEN in it. Plus the Fantastic Four, Nick Cage, Captain America, Dr. Strange, and a bunch of other Marvel Universe regulars I’ve forgotten. Mutants start showing up in the year 1602, and prehistory starts repeating itself, sort of. It’s fantastic. A 6-comic series that ended up being 8 because there wasn’t enough room for it all. Even more awesomeness.

American Gods and Anansi Boys. I read American Gods (again) for #1b1t on twitter – in fact I joined twitter so I could follow it. #1b1t was the first twitter book club (one book one twitter). Twitterers voted on what book the world should read – and American Gods won. I read Anansi Boys (again) because I was reading the part of Gaiman’s blog where he was writing it – and wanted to give it another shot.

American Gods is a fabulous book, probably the novel that moved me from liking Gaiman’s writing to looooving it (I’d already read Neverwhere, Stardust and Smoke and Mirrors). It is the story of Shadow, a seemingly-regular-joe who got in a bit of trouble, and gets out of jail to find that ancient gods (like Odin and Icarus and hundreds of others) are battling new gods (like Media and Techboy), and he’s caught in the middle. A road story, and buddy story, a coming-of-age story, and a treatise on the waves of peoples who have come to the ‘new world.’ Also about human nature, and faith. Did I say I loved it? LOVED it. I think I first read it in 2002ish when it first came out in paperback. This was probably my fifth time – still fantastic. Couldn’t stick to the reading schedule for #1b1t and finished it the 3rd week.

Anansi Boys is… well, my least favorite Gaiman book (see, my love is not blind!). To be fair, the first time I read it, I thought it was a sequel to AG, which it most definitely is not. It shares one minor character in a completely different context. This book is a comic (as in funny, not as in pictures + word balloons) undertaking, whereas AG is a serious and contemplative novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s like when the movie trailer looks like a romantic comedy and the film turns out to be gory horror flick – it messes everything up. So I was reading it again to give it a fair shot (and this time prefaced by Gaiman’s blog discussion). Still my least favorite Gaiman, but I liked it better the second time around. AG is my favorite kind of novel, and very well-done. AB… isn’t. My favorite kind of novel, that is. It is very well-done.

For those of you sick to death of me blogging (and talking, and texting, and facebooking) about Mr. Gaiman – you’ll be happy to hear that I only have about 18 12 months of blog left to read. Then I will have Read. It. All.

Well, all except the American Gods blog – which is in a book w/some other stuff, so I’ll be reading it there when I can get a copy. But I have to warn you… he’s still blogging. And writing. And twittering. And now I’m following his fiance and his assistant because they are both funny and interesting as well (no, Officer, I was not peaking into Mr. Gaiman’s windows. These binoculars? I was merely admiring those fine bee-hives over yonder, why do you ask?).

So, maybe he won’t own the place, but this will certainly not be a Gaiman-less zone any time soon. You’ve been warned.

* Absolute refers to the size and paper quality and such, and is not to be construed as commentary on Death, death, dying, or how it’s much like taxes. In case you were wondering.

The Lonely Polygamistis a strange sort of book. And I mean that in a good way. A man with four wives, part of a Mormon-offshoot sect, who is ineffectual and bumbling. And falling in love with a woman who is not (one of) his wives. Oh yeah, and lonely. Udall treats this “alternative lifestyle” with delicacy and respect (ha! am loving the opportunity to lump this old-style Mormon cult in w/the LGBT community!). In the end, we are all just humans, shaped and damaged by our upbringing and trying to find peace and happiness in our lives.

I liked a lot of things about this book, and I really liked the way it ended. I did think it went on a bit longer than necessary in some sections. I loved that we got to know the title character, Golden, as well as one wife, and one child (not of that wife) closely, to give a well-rounded picture of the family dynamics, and some of the many ways you can be lonely in a family w/more than 30 people in it. Because, as we’ve all heard before, it is sometimes lonelier to be with people than it is to be alone.

The Lonely Polygamist also has something to say about the rewards (and possible risks) of taking initiative, owning your responsibilities and pursuing your dreams (not your impulses). The picture of a chaotic family home (whether you have one mom or four) rings true and brings humor to the sometimes-depressing narrative of a man who (of course) must hit bottom before he can see his way clear to make a better choice.

The book made me bawl like a baby at one point (near the end, I won’t spoil it for ya) though in my defense, it was 2 am. If it had been earlier, I may have just bawled like a woman in her 40s.

This book includes a lot of info about nuclear bomb testing in the Utah/New Mexico area for a decade in the 50s/early 60s. I admit I’d heard of these tests but knew very little about the details. This book shocked me with some of the (google-search verified) historically accurate details regarding the fall-out of above-ground nuclear (!) testing near populated areas. (I was going to say ‘on U.S. soil’, but exactly who’s soil would it be ‘ok’ to test this stuff on?!). Golden’s father made it big by finding uranium in Utah, and several of the main characters were injured in one big test gone bad.

I should probably add – I was thrilled to finish the book, because I’d picked up Absolute Sandman #1 by Neil Gaiman at the library and COULD NOT WAIT to read it. And it was awesome, and too short (only 20 issues? 9 of which I’d read before? Where is Absolute Sandman #2 already!?).